


Cold Comfort

by simonsaysfunction



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/F, Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-30
Updated: 2012-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-30 09:22:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simonsaysfunction/pseuds/simonsaysfunction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The aftermath of a death in the family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Comfort

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Act II, specifically the quest “All That Remains”.

Hawke never cried to Aveline. They were best friends, practically inseparable (the times they weren’t attached at the hip, Aveline was either working or with Donnic, while Hawke was busy with her less scrupulous dealings or losing to Varric at Wicked Grace) ever since their chance meeting fleeing Ferelden and the Blight, but Hawke never cried to her. Aveline asked her after the horrors they’d seen in the Foundry if she was all right, if she needed anything and Hawke had given her a brief smile, reassured her that she was fine, and had sauntered out of her office with every bit of her usual swagger.

And if Hawke never cried to Aveline, then Hawke surely didn’t cry to Bhodan or Sandal or Orana, or most especially her travelling companions who saw her as their de facto leader. With one exception. One exception that was ripped up inside every time she saw the tall warrior collapse into ragged sobs over the smallest thing, who would bury her face into her companion’s chest while long fingers soothed through short, messy hair. Marian would cry herself to sleep, dreams fitful and sometimes violent, memories that plagued her, taunted her about how she couldn’t save Carver or Bethany or her mother.

It was painful to witness and harder still to know there was nothing to be done, nothing that could assuage the burden of guilt from normally strong-set shoulders and perfect posture and poise. Nothing that could be said to make the refugee-come-noble see that she had done everything in her power to stop the blood mage that had desecrated that wonderful woman’s body to fit his twisted desires, she had tried, of course, had sat at the grieving woman’s bedside and offered the only words of comfort that could come to mind when Hawke tried to say it was all her fault.

_Listen, if you want to blame anyone, blame that madman, Quentin. You loved your mother, and she knew it. It wasn’t your fault._

Hawke had curled herself around her and let the tears fall for the first time and it had continued like that ever since, their dirty little secret of inner agony of the outwardly stalwart warrior.

Isabela didn’t know what was worse: watching Hawke cry and cling to her for comfort, or the fact that she let the warrior do it.


End file.
